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chapter seventeen
RECONSTRUCTION,
1863—1877
Answer one of these questions on
chapter 17and turn it in on Thursday
(November 20). I expect 1-3 pages
Identify the goals of the
Congressional Plan for
Reconstruction and
Lincoln’s plan. How were
they fundamentally
different in their goals?
Why did Southern
farmers become so
dependent on
cotton in the postwar era, and what
were the results?
Reconstruction has been said to have been a
missed opportunity. Was it? What were the
failures of reconstruction? The successes?
RECONSTRUCTION, 1863–1877
• What does the painting in the next slide
indicate about the task of Reconstruction?
Decorating the Graves of Rebel Soldiers, Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1867
A women’s group raised enough funds to transfer over 16,000
Confederate dead from Northern cemeteries for reburial in Richmond.
CHAPTER FOCUS QUESTIONS
• What were the competing political plans for
reconstructing the defeated Confederacy?
• How difficult was the transition from slavery
to freedom for African Americans?
• What was the political and social legacy of
Reconstruction in the southern states?
• What were the post-Civil War transformations
in the economic and political life of the
North?
THE DEFEATED SOUTH
• The South had been
thoroughly defeated and its
economy lay in ruins.
• The presence of Union
troops further embittered
white Southerners.
• The bitterest pill was the
changed status of African
Americans whose freedom
seemed an affront to white
supremacy.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S PLAN
• Lincoln promoted a plan to bring states back
into the Union as swiftly as possible protecting
private property and opposing harsh
punishments.
• Amnesty was promised to those swearing allegiance.
• State governments could be established if 10 percent
of the voters took an oath of allegiance.
• Lincoln used a pocket veto to kill a plan passed
by Congressional radicals
• Redistribution of land posed another problem.
• Congress created the Freedman’s Bureau and
passed the Thirteenth Amendment
ANDREW JOHNSON AND PRESIDENTIAL
RECONSTRUCTION
• Andrew Johnson, the new president,
was a War Democrat from Tennessee.
• He had used harsh language to
describe southern “traitors” but blamed
individuals rather than the entire South
for secession.
• While Congress was not in session he
granted amnesty to most
Confederates.
• Initially, wealthy landholders and members of
the political elite had been excluded, but
Johnson pardoned most of them.
• By December, Johnson claimed that
“restoration” was virtually complete.
THE RADICAL REPUBLICAN VISION
• Radical Republicans wanted to remake the South in
the North’s image, advocating land redistribution to
make former slaves independent landowners.
• Stringent “Black Codes” outraged many Northerners.
• In December 1865, Congress excluded the southern
representatives.
• Congress overrode Johnson’s vetoes of a Civil Rights
bill and a bill to enlarge the scope of the Freedman’s
Bureau.
• Fearful that courts might declare the Civil Rights Act
unconstitutional, Congress drafted the Fourteenth
Amendment.
• Republicans won the Congressional elections of 1866
that had been a showdown between Congress and
Johnson over Reconstruction and the amendment.
CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
AND THE IMPEACHMENT CRISIS
• The First Reconstruction Act of 1867
enfranchised blacks and divided the South
into five military districts.
• A crisis developed over whether Johnson
could replace Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton.
• In violation of the Tenure of Office Act,
Johnson fired Stanton.
• The House impeached Johnson but the
Senate vote fell one vote short of
conviction.
• This set the precedent that criminal actions by a president—
not political disagreements—warranted removal from
office.
RECONSTRUCTION
OF THE SOUTH,
1866–1867
Dates for the
readmission of former
Confederate states to
the Union and the return
of Democrats to power
varied according to the
specific political
situations in those states.
THE ELECTION OF 1868
• By 1868, eight of the eleven
ex-Confederate states were
back in the Union.
• Republicans nominated
Ulysses Grant for president.
• The Republicans attacked
Democrats’ loyalties.
• Democrats exploited racism
to gather votes and used
terror in the South to keep
Republicans from voting.
• Republicans won with less
than 53 percent of the vote.
RECONSTRUCTION AND RATIFICATION
• The remaining unreconstructed states (Mississippi, Texas,
and Virginia) had to ratify both the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments to be admitted to the Union.
• National citizenship included former slaves (“all persons born or
naturalized in the United States”).
• “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.”
• The states ratified the amendments and rejoined the
Union in 1870.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND
RECONSTRUCTION
• Women’s rights activists were outraged that the
new laws enfranchised African Americans but
not women.
• The movement split over whether to support a
linkage between the rights of women and
African Americans.
• The more radical group fought against the passage of
the Fifteenth Amendment and formed an all-female
suffrage group.
• A more moderate group supported the amendment
while working toward suffrage at a state level and
enlisting the support of men.
MOVING ABOUT
• For many freed people, the first impulse to
define freedom was to move about.
• Many who left soon returned to seek work
in their neighborhoods.
• Others sought new lives in predominantly
black areas, even cities.
• Former slaves enjoyed the freedom of no
longer having to show deference to whites.
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY
• Freedom provided the
chance to reunite with lost
family members.
• The end of slavery allowed
African Americans to more
closely fulfill appropriate
gender roles.
• Males took on more authority in
the family.
• Women continued to work
outside the home.
AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES AND
SCHOOLS
• Emancipation allowed exslaves to practice religion
without white interference.
• African-American
communities pooled their
resources to establish
churches, the first social
institution that they fully
controlled.
• Education was another
symbol of freedom.
• By 1869 over 3,000 Freedman’s
Bureau schools taught over
150,000 students.
• Black colleges were
established as well.
LAND LABOR AFTER SLAVERY
• Most former slaves hoped to become selfsufficient farmers, but with no land
redistribution this dream was not fulfilled.
• The Freedman’s Bureau was forced to evict
tens of thousands of blacks that had been
settled on confiscated lands.
• At war’s end most planters expected blacks to
work for wages in gangs, but this was
unacceptable to many ex-slaves.
• Sharecropping came to dominate the
southern agricultural economy.
SHARECROPPING AND LIVING
PATTERNS
• Sharecropping represented
a compromise between
planter and former slave.
• Sharecroppers set their own
hours and tasks.
• Families labored together
on adjoining parcels of
land.
THE ORIGINS OF AFRICAN
AMERICAN POLITICS
• Former slaves organized
politically to protect their
interests and to promote their
own participation.
• Five states had black electoral
majorities.
• The Union League became the
political voice of former slaves.
• New leaders, drawn from the
ranks of teachers and ministers,
emerged to give direction to
the black community as it
fought for equal rights.
On February 25, 1870,
Hiram Rhodes Revels was
seated by Mississippi as
the first black member of
the Senate.
SOUTHERN REPUBLICANS
• Most northerners were satisfied with a
reconstruction that brought the South back
into the Union with a viable Republican
Party.
• Achieving this goal required active Federal
support to protect the African-American
voters upon which it depended.
• Republicans also drew strength from:
• white, northern, middle-class emigrants
called carpetbaggers
• native southern white Republicans called
scalawags who were businessmen and
Unionists from the mountains with old scores
to settle
• The result was an uneasy alliance, with each
group pushing an agenda that was
incompatible with the plans devised by its
allies.
RECONSTRUCTING THE STATES
• Throughout the South, state conventions that
had a significant African-American presence
drafted constitutions and instituted political and
humanitarian reforms.
• The new governments insisted on equal rights, but
accepted separate schools.
• The Republican governments did little to assist
African Americans in acquiring land though
they did help protect the rights of black
laborers to bargain freely.
• Republican leaders envisioned promoting
northern-style prosperity and gave heavy
subsidies for railroad development.
• These plans frequently opened the doors to
corruption and bankrupted the states.
This seemed
like a good
time to wish
you Happy
Thanksgiving.
WHITE RESISTANCE
• Many white southerners believed that
the Republicans were not a legitimate
political group.
• Paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan
used terror to destroy the
Reconstruction governments and
intimidate their supporters.
• Congress passed several laws to crack down
on the Klan.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed
racial discrimination in public places.
REDEMPTION
• As wartime idealism faded
and Democrats gained
strength in the North, northern
Republicans abandoned the
freed people and their white
allies.
• Conservative Democrats
(Redeemers) won control of
southern states.
• Between 1873 and 1883, the
Supreme Court weakened
enforcement of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments and overturned
convictions of Klan members.
In 1880 when General Hancock
became the presidential
nominee of the Democrats,
Republican cartoonists showed
the Democratic party history as
a horror chamber featuring
atrocities in the Civil War era.
“KING COTTON”
• The South grew more heavily
dependent on cotton.
• The crop lien system
provided loans in exchange
for a lien on the crop.
• As cotton prices spiraled
downward, cotton growers
fell more deeply into debt.
• Merchants became the elite
in the South.
• The South emerged as an
impoverished region.
SOUTHERN
SHARECROPPING
AND THE
COTTON BELT
1880 The economic
depression of the 1870s
forced increasing
numbers of Southern
farmers, both white and
black, into sharecropping
arrangements.
THE ELECTION OF 1876
• As the election of 1876
approached, new scandals in the
Grant administration hurt the
Republicans.
• The Democrats nominated
Samuel J. Tilden of New York, a
former prosecutor. Democrats
combined attacks on
Reconstruction with attacks on
corruption.
• The Republican nominee,
Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio,
accused Democrats of treason
and promised to clean up
corruption.
THE ELECTION
OF 1876
The presidential
election of 1876
left the nation
without a clear-cut
winner.
CRISIS AND RESOLUTION
• Tilden won more votes than Hayes,
but both sides claimed victory.
• In three southern states two sets of
electoral votes were returned.
• An electoral commission awarded
the disputed votes to Hayes.
• Hayes struck a deal that promised
money for southern internal
improvements and noninterference
in southern affairs.
• The remaining federal troops were
removed from the South.
• The remaining Republican
governments in the South lost
power.